Ch’ixi Futurity, by Ana María León – 14 February 2022

From The Funambulist

The Settler Colonial City Project founded by Ana María León and Andrew Herscher has been instrumental in confronting the architecture discipline with its role in the consolidation of settler colonialism in Turtle Island. For this issue however, we asked Ana María if she could write a text about her home country, Ecuador. In this short text, she describes the contradiction between the Indigenous ontology claimed by the State in recent years and the invasive and destructive oil extractivism on Indigenous lands.

Ecuador is a small country with a big heartbreak. For such a country that has depended on the revenues of oil for decades, a future without oil seems impossible. And yet, as I sit here writing from Ecuador and thinking of Ecuador, I understand that a future free from oil is the only future we can aspire to and the only future we can work towards.

It is a common misconception to envision South American populations as homogenous, ignoring the erasures and violence enacted by mestizo groups over Indigenous and Black populations. I understand this as an Ecuadorian mestizo of Chinese, Spanish, and unknown ancestry. I am the product of transnational migrations and also now a migrant myself, an academic that teaches in the United States and is currently in Ecuador because of the uncertainties of this pandemic. I am part of so many populations and yet I’m not sure I belong anywhere, and perhaps because of this transient status it has been difficult for me to fathom Indigenous claims and rights. I am still learning.

The Amazon jungle is one of a set of regions in South America whose location, far from ports and urban centers, difficult geography, and lack of desired colonial resources, made them less attractive to colonization. These areas became a refuge for Indigenous groups fleeing colonial violence, adding to already existing populations. In the Andes, independence processes were led by criollos—Spanish descendants born in the Americas—with Indigenous populations often caught in the battles between these groups, their mestizo allies, and those still loyal to the Spanish crown. The legacies of these conflicts have prompted greater concentration of Indigenous populations in formerly remote and formerly unprofitable areas. Here, while their lives are inevitably enmeshed within contemporary processes, Indigenous groups have retained some capacity to maintain relations with human and non-human lifeways. In and around urban centers, Indigenous groups have a strong presence in political representation and governance. They are also interconnected with the mestizo majority, made up of multiple groups including many who are ethnically close to Indigenous ancestry, but whose traditions and memories have been erased by the ongoing cultural dominance of economic empires.

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Ana María León is an architect and historian whose work studies how spatial practices shape the modernity and coloniality of the Americas. She is a co-founder of the Settler Colonial City Project and the author of ‘Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires’.

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